Using local Berlin R & D DaimlerChrysler agent framework.
Advised by Berlin research to use agents
for application government-funded transportation
project: Faster traffic flow without ill-effects.
Philips Semiconductors is one of several partners.
"MobiChip" developed by Philips that
will have a "knowledge manager".
MobiChip stores user preferences and can be used at travel kiosks that will plan travel for the user. Will be used for eComerce and electronic ticketing. Little processing - keys on the card are used for encryption so that key exchange is not necessary. (Who does backup?)
Four types of agents: UI (resource), Task, MobiChip User, Facilitators: Broker and Creator. UI knows Corba, SQL, and other APIs. Does a translation into common ontology. A task agent will know about leisure events. An intermodal router can plan various forms of transportation from one location to another - travel to an event, where ever it is, and then a dinner somewhere near later. User Agents are created and destroyed dynamically.
Problems with restart of both agents and registry - could be solved by JATLite - existing system did not even have persistent registry. Problem with plan monitoring - could be addressed by ProcessLink planning. Problems with ontologies (as usual). Problems with debugging, especially protocols (slightly surprised). Performance is not yet a major issue but should be. Brokers are creating bottlenecks with thousands of users. Did some caching to avoid resource and content queries. Did not use multiple brokers. (Not sure of rationale for this design decision.)
Advantages of agents. Coupling of heterogeneous systems. (Similar to point in my talk of system integration.) Content and task agents can be developed independently. Developer only had to know the ontology. High level of abstraction allowed focus on business policy. Message transport not an issue. Protocols good because they limit message types and allow for asynch comm. (Similar to points in my talk.) Modularization, encapsulation and scalability good. Agents can changed and added dynamically. (Interesting to see comparision with alternative.) Also hardware easily swapped.